


Words of a Life

by AllThoseOtherWorlds



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Gen, Guilt, Hallucinations, Hopeful Ending, Mental Institutions, Poetry, but the story is prose, magnet poetry, poetry is in the story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-02
Updated: 2014-05-02
Packaged: 2018-01-21 15:55:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1555910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AllThoseOtherWorlds/pseuds/AllThoseOtherWorlds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam's pretty sure he's not going to be able to sleep, ever, since hallucifer doesn't shut up. Instead of trying, he goes to the common room and plays around with a magnet poetry set. After trying to put his life into a poem, he's reminded of what he told Dean about guilt - something that was easy to forget after his hallucinations got worse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Words of a Life

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural. I don't make money from this.
> 
> Secondary disclaimer: Views on Sam's actions and guilt are his own, not mine. I'm just writing them.
> 
> Comments and constructive criticisms are always welcome! **Even if you didn't finish reading the piece, I'd like to know what you did and/or didn't like.**
> 
> This was written for A Story a Day, for the prompt "Magnet Poetry". There was another prompt for 100 words, but as you can see I ignored that one.
> 
> **Enjoy!**

            Sam stared at the haphazard cluster of words on the little magnet board. He didn’t know why he was doing this. It wasn’t like he was much of a creative writer or anything – demon hunting rarely gave people the time to explore such hobbies.

            “Mmm,” Lucifer agreed from behind him. “But you can be _very_ creative with pleading and screaming, right Sam?”

            Oh. That was why.

            Sam tried to shut out his hallucination’s irritating voice and focused on the words in front of him. When they’d finally realised he wasn’t getting to sleep any time soon, the staff here decided to let him go to a sort of common room that was shared among the patients on his floor.

            Messing around with the magnet poetry set had seemed better than the multiplayer games or talking to people, so he’d pulled it out and found a corner to settle down in.

            Scanning the word bank, he separated a few that leapt out at him – “blood”, “smoke”, and “brother”. He knew most people would probably see “smoke” as a relative of fire, but he couldn’t think of anything other than the black cloud of a demon.

            “It doesn’t have to be smoke to be a demon though, Sam,” Lucifer reminded him. “Blood can do the job too, you know.” He gestured to one of the other tiles Sam had separated from the mass and raised an eyebrow at him.

            Sam pointedly ignored him, but made a note not to use those two words in the same line. Instead, he pulled out “born” to use with smoke and “fool” with blood, putting them together in neatly spaced rows.

            Going back to the group of words stuck in the corner, he scanned for anything else that leapt out at him. He passed over “marble” and “ocean”, but found himself pulling out “universe” and “remember.” May as well make it his life story – not like anyone would believe it on any level unless it was tied up in poetry.

            He toyed with the idea of putting “remember” closer to “blood”, and found Lucifer nodding in the corners of his vision.

            “What else do you really have to remember, Sam?”

            He growled under his breath and restrained the urge to snap at the archangel. Yelling at his hallucinations would do nothing good.

            Instead, he vindictively placed “brother” next to “remember”, starting another row below the one he had.

            “You know none of this makes any sense, right Sam?” Lucifer asked him. He laughed softly. “Of course, nothing you say makes sense to them anyway,” he added, gesturing to the other patients and the staff in the room.

            Sam looked at the “universe” magnet and tried to decide what to do with it. He’d pulled it out because it had stuck out at him, because wasn’t the Apocalypse relatively universal? He decided to keep the word, but didn’t know what to pair it with. They didn’t have a magnet for “Apocalypse”, obviously – this was the poetry set, not theology – but he added the word to his poem anyway, wedging it between “bleed fool” and “remember brother”. The Apocalypse mess had been after the demon blood and before he ended up in the Cage, struggling to remember Dean and life and anything good, so he thought the placement was appropriate.

            Lucifer whistled in appreciation from where he was sitting cross-legged on a table. “Nice, Sam. Still so logical.”

            Sam rolled his eyes and tried to figure out what came after the Cage. What piece could he use for what was happening now? He didn’t think they’d have words for hallucinations of the devil that wouldn’t let you sleep.

            After a few minutes he pulled out “voice” and “hard” and tried to find appropriate conjunctions to go between everything. Surprisingly, he thought that was almost harder than picking out the words had been to begin with.

            When he was done, Lucifer looked at the poem over his shoulder and shrugged. “Not your best work, Sam,” he said. “Didn’t teach you poetry at Stanford, huh?”

            Sam agreed with him, but would never give Lucifer (himself? His subconscious?) the satisfaction of admitting it, so he ignored him. Lucifer kept talking anyway, reading out the lines of the magnet-poem.

Smoke born  
Bleed to fool  
Going from universe  
Remember brother  
The voice  
Is hard

            “Aww, you even included me!” Lucifer exclaimed. “Really, Sam, you don’t know how much that means to me.”

            Sam glared at him, but stopped as he realized he wasn’t quite alone anymore. Another patient had come up behind him and was studying the poem intently.

            “What does it mean?” she asked.

            Sam thought about it. The words were picked to illustrate his life, but what did _that_ mean, really? Sure, he’d stopped the Apocalypse, but hadn’t he been one of the reasons there was even an Apocalypse to begin with? He sighed. “Nothing,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

            The woman turned her attention from the painting to him, dark eyes searching his face.

            “Everything means something,” she said. “That’s what words do.” She looked at the poem again, brow furrowed. “It looks painful.”

            “They didn’t have a magnet for pain,” Sam said, because he’d looked for one but hadn’t found it. Too bad, really, because if he was making a poem about his life he was sure that word should have been in it.

            She nodded, scanning the word bank to verify his claim. “Maybe they didn’t need one,” she said, and then, “maybe you don’t need one either.”

            He looked at her. “What?”

            She shrugged, reaching out absentmindedly to sort the stockpile of words into neater groups. “Maybe you don’t need pain all the time.”

            He thought about it, and wanted to say something but wasn’t really sure what. He settled on “maybe,” because that was always a good reply, and the woman wandered off to go chat with some other patients. Sam kept staring at the board.

            Of course he needed pain. She didn’t know what he’d _done_ , what he could have _become_ – he had nightmares about it sometimes, when his dreams didn’t feature Lucifer exclusively. He dreamt about worlds where he had taken up the leadership of hell; worlds where he had said “yes” and Lucifer had ridden him into the end; worlds where he hadn’t stayed clean and the blood had twisted him into something else.

            How did that not deserve pain?

            He closed his eyes for a moment and felt Lucifer mocking him, taunting him with memories of the Cage. He snapped his eyes open.

            Hadn’t he _gotten_ pain? If anything was ever going to be enough to make him pay for his mistakes, wasn’t it _that?_ He wasn’t sure there was a way for him to suffer more than he had in the pit without going to Hell proper, and somehow turning into a demon didn’t seem like appropriate penance.

            He stared at the poem again, turning the thoughts around in his mind. Suddenly a memory came to him unbidden of him talking to Dean, telling him that he figured the Cage had been payment for everything that came before, and he remembered meaning it. That sentiment had been great, and enough to get him through for a while, but with Lucifer there all the time it had been really easy to forget, to slip back into old patterns, old guilt.

            He wiped all the magnets off the board, erasing his poem and the words within it.

            He knew he’d never be able to wipe the slate truly clean, but he had enough to deal with from the archangel whispering in his ear. He didn’t want to have old guilt sticking around to fight off, too.


End file.
